News & Events

Our diocese holds an annual walking pilgrimage for youth and families over Labor Day Weekend.

Imagine a Procession with the Cross like the one that occurs around the Church at Pascha or at our parish feast — but that travels 10+ miles in a day!

This year, the Walk for Life will be taking place in Northern Indiana, starting at the Nativity of the Mother of God Serbian Orthodox Monastery in New Carlisle. This monastery has a stunning Church and the route of the pilgrimage will take us through quiet woods and lush farm fields. We gather Friday evening, September 1, walk on Saturday & Sunday and depart with renewed peace on Monday, September 4. We will pray together, camp out together, and enjoy an experience rarely found in America.

Each year several members of our parish — some young, some old! — have joined me for this very special, spiritual event. Perhaps you and your family would like to participate?

This Friday at 6:30 p.m. we will serve the Vigil for the Great Feast of Transfiguration (confession at 6 p.m.) and Saturday morning we will serve Divine Liturgy at 9 a.m. with the blessing of grapes, apples and other fruit.

The Lord, Who created all things, reminds us in this Feast that not only do the fruits of the earth come from Him, but that we are His as well. Though the illness of sin drags us down to something less than what He intended, the Grace of the Holy Orthodox Church can heal us and transform us into the fullness of the image and likeness of Christ. May God transform us all into the human beings He intended!

Join us at these services to ask this great gift of the Lord for your own soul.

Though we do not have services today (I am in St. Louis with my mother this week, returning on Saturday), we still ask for the prayers of holy St. Vladimir for our Holy Russian Orthodox Church, our parish and all our parishioners and friends who bear his holy name!

The importance of St. Vladimir has long been recognized by the faithful, including by Archbishop Vitaly (Maximenko) who made plans to build a memorial church in honor of the baptism of Rus’ dedicated to St. Vladimir in the late 1930s. Vladyka Vitaly served on the east coast and chose to locate this new church in central New Jersey in the town of Jackson. This parish holds annual celebrations which, for the last several years, have included the participation of our own Fr. Deacon Alexander Petrovsky as the choir director. Fr. Alexander’s father, Archpriest Philip Petrovsky, was ordained at this parish and served there many years, so there is a long and deep family connection with this parish.

This weekend services for the glorification of St. Mardary are being held in Chicago. The Serbian Patriarch and many other bishops, including our Archbishop Peter, are attending. Among the bishops present is Bishop Vasilije, the Serbian bishop of the diocese of Srem, the same diocese which in the 1920s became the residence of Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) as well as other Russian clergy and laity who had fled the communist revolution. Bishop Vasilije is seeking funds to aid in the building of a small church in his diocese in honor of the White Russian Orthodox Christians who were guests of the King of Yugoslavia following the Russian Civil War. This church will be modeled after the beautiful temple in Darmstadt, Germany.

Though some of our parishioners do not have any particular Russian ethnicity, nonetheless, without the White Movement there would not be a Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. Further, the first First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), the great educator and theologian who was so influential on the Orthodox world of the pre- and post-Revolutionary period, was a guest of the Patriarch of Serbia at the Patriarchal palace in Sremski Karlovci – first of Patriarch Demetrius, later of Patriarch Barnabas. In other words, this is a worthy cause and one which we really should support.

We gather tonight and tomorrow morning to remember the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, he whom the Lord called the greatest of the prophets! (see Luke 7:28)

Confession begins at 6 p.m. followed by Vigil at 6:30 p.m. tonight and Divine Liturgy at 9 a.m. tomorrow.

As many of you have noticed, we have a problem with water leaking into the altar so that the drywall in the apse is discolored and damaged. For more than 18 months we have been investigating this problem and trying to make our contractor, Bruns, fulfill its warranty and complete the needed repairs. While we don’t yet know when the repair work will begin, we do have a commitment from Bruns to do the work. To seek God’s help in this important job — without it we cannot safely install iconography on the walls in the altar — we will serve a moleben before the start of any good work this coming Sunday at the end of the liturgy. Please join us to pray for God’s assistance!

On Saturday confession begins at 5:30 p.m. followed by Vigil at 6 p.m. Divine Liturgy on Sunday starts at 10 a.m.

We are working on moving our website to a new platform and updating the content. We hope this will help make it easier to maintain and allow us to provide more information to the parish about upcoming services and events.